City Council president cancels suit hearing

City Council President John Street cancelled today's scheduled round of Council hearings on the Mayor's Scholarships dispute, possibly signaling the end for a bill that would restate the University's scholarship commitment in its favor. And in an unrelated development, a common pleas judge has set a date for oral arguments in a class-action lawsuit against the University about how many scholarships it must award, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said yesterday. Street called off the hearings after many Council members requested that the University provide more data on the scholarship program between 1977 and the present, according to Edna Irving, Street's chief of staff. Irving said the joint hearing of Council's Rules and Education committees could resume about a week after members receive the information, which University officials said they are in the process of gathering. But several Council members said they believe the University prompted Street to cancel the hearings altogether. They suggested that University officials feared the bill would not pass and that another hearing would only cause its image further public damage. "I think it's a realization by [University officials] that they were wrong," Councilman-at-large Angel Ortiz said. "They saw that the opposition was so broad that they were not going to have a chance to get their way." Councilman-at-large David Cohen, who has been joined by Ortiz in criticizing the University's position, agreed. "It's quite clear that their efforts to get City Council to accept their interpretation of the situation has pretty much run aground," Cohen said. John Gould, executive director of the president's office, acknowledged yesterday that University officials did not relish further hearings, but insisted that they had not made any requests to cancel the hearings. Street could not be reached for comment yesterday and his chief of staff declined to explain the rationale behind the cancellation. Last Friday, several hostile witnesses and Council members challenged the University's position on a disputed 1977 city ordinance that requires the University to award qualified Philadelphia high school graduates with scholarships in return for city land. The Rules Committee heard testimony on a bill that would replace the existing ordinance with one reflecting the University's belief that it must provide only a total of 125 awards in any one year. Plaintiffs in the suit, represented by the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelpia, allege the University owes 125 new scholarships each year for a total of 500 at any one time. In order for the bill to be passed on to the full Council body, the Rules Committee must meet again at least to hold a vote. If the hearings do not resume, Bill 66 will stay in committee and will not be implemented. PILCOP lawyer Michael Churchill said yesterday that Judge Nelson Diaz slated April 14 to hear oral arguments on the University's motion to dismiss the suit. Lawyers for the plaintiffs will argue their case before the judge, and University lawyers will then attempt to justify their preliminary objections to the suit. Based on the oral arguments, Diaz will decide whether to grant the University's motion and dismiss the case. If he rejects the motion, the case will move one step closer to a trial.

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